Two Trump lawyers may have lied about hush payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, top Democrat says

Sheri Dillon, a personal attorney to President Trump, arrives at Trump Tower in New York in January 2017. (Andrew Harnik / AP)

Two of President Trump’s attorneys may have lied to government ethics officials about a pre-2016 election payment issued on Trump’s behalf to a woman who says she had sex with him over a decade ago, according to records obtained by House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings.

In a letter to White House counsel Pat Cipollone on Friday, the Maryland Democrat said his panel had reviewed documents showing Sheri Dillon, a personal lawyer to Trump, and Stefan Passantino, a former deputy counsel in the administration, may have provided “false information” to the Office of Government Ethics about whether Trump reimbursed his former fixer, Michael Cohen, for the hush money payment he made to porn star Stormy Daniels.

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“This raises significant questions about why some of the President’s closest advisers made these false claims and the extent to which they too were acting at the direction of, or in coordination with, the President,” Cummings wrote.

According to Cummings, Dillon told OGE officials in several interviews that Trump never owed any money to Cohen in 2016 and 2017 and that she had thereby advised him he didn’t need to list any debts to Cohen in his financial disclosure forms.

But, after former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani unexpectedly made the startling revelation on national television that Trump had actually reimbursed Cohen, Dillon switched up her story, telling OGE officials on May 3, 2018 that “Mr. Cohen always knew that he would be reimbursed but the mechanisms for reimbursement changed over time.”

Passantino similarly told OGE officials there was a “revolving” retainer agreement for Cohen and that it didn’t need to be reported on the financial disclosure forms — which was contradicted by Cohen’s guilty plea to campaign finance crimes stemming from the hush payment to Daniels.

Dillon did not return a request for comment.

Passantino, who left the administration in September, told the Daily News that he didn’t lie to OGE officials and said he “made no representations of the White House regarding the facts of Michael Cohen’s financial relationship with anyone.”

Cummings said the alleged discrepancies detected in OGE records warrant that Cipollone immediately release documents that his committee has demanded from the White House as part of its investigation into whether Trump deliberately omitted his debt to Cohen from his 2016-2017 financial disclosure.

Purposely obscuring information from a presidential financial disclosure is a crime.

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